Dispatches from the 10th Crusade

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"You're free to choose--Just don't do anything I wouldn't do."

Via Secondhand Smoke comes a particularly odious and ominous Canadian reaction to the Palin nomination. Our neighbors to the North sometimes do seem to be somewhat more advanced in the disciplines of the culture of death even than Americans.

But others fear Ms. Palin's emergence as a parental role model sends a different message. As a vocal opponent of abortion, Ms. Palin's widely discussed decision to keep her baby, knowing he would be born with the condition, may inadvertently influence other women who may lack the necessary emotional and financial support to do the same, according to André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada.

Lalonde tries to cast this as a matter of making women "free to choose."

Dr. Lalonde said that above all else, women must be free to choose, and that popular messages to the contrary could have detrimental effects on women and their families.

"The worry is that this will have an implication for abortion issues in Canada," he said.

But is that really what it is about? Look at the previous paragraph. Lalonde is evidently unhappy at the thought that the poor might get all excited by Sarah Palin as a role model and might fail to abort their Down's Syndrome children, despite the fact that, in his view, they lack the "emotional and financial support" to be capable of raising a Down's Syndrome child. (Adoption, I note, is not even in the menu of choices.) God forbid Sarah Palin should "inadvertently" influence anyone not to kill a Down's Syndrome child. My own suspicion is that she wishes deliberately to influence people in that direction, which would no doubt make Dr. Lalonde even more unhappy.

Later in the article, advocates for the disabled tell how women pregnant with Down's Syndrome children are given a one-sided view of the matter and thus pressured to abort. Dr. Lalonde is indignant at the suggestion, but he's already tipped his hand.

Giving women balanced information about the potential consequences of either decision does not mean they are being encouraged to abort their pregnancies, Dr. Lalonde said.

"We offer the woman the choice. We try to be as unbiased as possible," he said. "We're coming down to a moral decision and we all know moral decisions are personal decisions."

Comments (10)

Because he's a doctor, so he thinks it's his business to give advice. Or so I infer. Another bit of background to this is that the professional organization he represents has changed its recommendations in recent years to that it now recommends that all women get prenatal testing for conditions in their child like Down's Syndrome. It used to be that the recommendation was only for older women. To me that says something. The increasing emphasis in prenatal diagnosis of Down's Syndrome, it seems to me, is that false positives are not really the worry so much as false negatives. In other words, we want to be sure to find out about _all_ the unborn children with Down's Syndrome, even if we accidentally scare a few moms whose babies don't actually have it. That way, we can be sure that every mother carrying a Down's Syndrome baby has the opportunity to have it prenatally killed.

"We offer the woman the choice. We try to be as unbiased as possible," he said. "We're coming down to a moral decision and we all know moral decisions are personal decisions."

Choice/Unbiased/Moral: the three hypocrisies of the liberal left. You know, the statement doesn't even make sense. These are just three incoherent rhetorical sentences strung together. And there's a subtle sense of desperateness about them--

It makes the kind of postmodern "sense" that you get from people who think as he does. In his lexicon, 'moral' means, among other things, 'entirely subjective'. But in that case, why should he care if the women without "financial resources" are making the "wrong" choice?

"But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism...Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue."
Camille Pagliahttp://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/09/10/palin/index3.html

This woman is seriously incoherent. After that quotation you give, Kevin, and after her reiteration that the state has no right to stop a woman from obtaining what she has just identified as murder, we have this:

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

So she supports the death penalty for the murder of children, except when those children are located within their mother's bodies, in which case _even though she admits they are being murdered_ she not only opposes the death penalty but opposes _any_ penalty for the act.

Are the majority of abortions actually performed on poorer woman? This financial issue is always in their propaganda and I wonder if statistics actually show the fact, or do the pro-aborts have success in playing out this excuse.

Sanger was an active proponent of reducing the 'procreation' of the poor in order to reduce the proliferation of 'ignorants,' as she referred to them. The abortion industry seems to a be loyal follower of her philosophy.

Paglia is not consistent, perhaps not even coherent, but I give her credit for one thing; her refusal to employ deceptive euphemisms in advancing her ghoulish position. She supports abortion with her eyes wide-open. Does that make her more open to conversion? I think so, but can't say why, other than hard-hearts often yearn to be cracked.

I remember, Lydia, our side held that once we could convince people that a real live baby was being murdered the battle would be won. Sonograms and science have lifted the veil and a majority of Americans describe abortion as the taking of a young life, yet most still support its legalization. I can only assume there are a lot of people in extreme pain and waiting to be healed.

I read the entire Paglia article. The exerpted paragraphs from above are seriously apalling and have serious ramifications.

If the innocent can be murdered legally (abortion) and the guilty as well (death penalty), that does not bode well for the rest of us on the planet. I don't know what strength to an argument for excluding us living between these two poles she can offer that would protect anyone's life, including her own. I truly see the harbinger of death in this woman!

"Finally, someone has worked up the courage to say it. We’ve all been thinking it. It’s the soothing mantra we repeat while sitting in drive-time traffic, a petition we send up to the God of Battles with each breath like the Jesus Prayer, an invitation we whisper across the pillow as a prologue to a long night of lovin’.

Kill more Canadians. Kill. More. Canadians.

Gasping as we all do beneath the gilded, leaden tarp of smarmy PC nice-nice, we needed an outright Canadian to say it. It helped that he was a prominent doctor. Too bad he has a name that suggests a pock-cheeked, slippery-fingered sex therapist with a mail-order Psy.D. from Grenada: Dr. Andre Lalonde..."http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/kill_more_canadians/

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